ABSTRACT
Christopher Hill's main aim in writing The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution is to recover the voices, thoughts, and ideologies of a set of radical groups that had been pushed to the side or ignored by historians of the English Revolution. The picture of revolution is poles apart from the established way the English Civil Wars are portrayed as a simple struggle to establish constitutionalism—the authority of a constitutional government as against the divine right of a king to rule. The idea of the “revolt within the Revolution” was a major contribution to studies of the English Revolution. Hill’s approach to the topic was important and original because he looked at the ideas of the Puritan radicals as a whole, producing a vivid and all-encompassing picture of English Puritan radicalism in the 1640s and 1650s.
